# Virtual Influencers in the Asia Pacific symposium - Keynote from Dr Esperanza Miyake **Channel:** IERLab **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTVy62VPvY4 **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/eTVy62VPvY4 ## Chapters - 0:03 — Opening Remarks and Research Context - 6:08 — Nationhood, Emotion, and Everyday Life - 16:01 — Race, Biology, and Pandemic Fear - 22:35 — Transmedia Mobility and Platform Identity - 27:15 — Political Economy and Ethical Futures ## Transcript **[0:03]:** We are so excited. You know, I talked about being on the forefront of research and we are so privileged to have Dr. Esparenza Miyak whom I'll invite on screen at the moment to also share her slides with us. Um Dr. Miyak is a chancellor's fellow and senior lecturer in journalism, media and communications and also the chair of equity, diversity and inclusion in the department of humanities at the University of Strasclar. She's got a very impressive bio that I will let you read in the link shared by Naomi in the chat for everybody and take this last minute to tell you how much I've really enjoyed her book published last year, Virtual Influencers, Digital Identity in the Age of Multiple Realities. Now, as scholars, we all love reading and we all love a good book. But I must say this book in particular covers such an expensive scope of a forefront and innovative phenomena that you cannot help but wonder just how quickly Maka works or just how deep she has sunk her teeth in **[1:02]:** the roots into studying this phenomenon. The book covers topics like virtual place and nationhood, virtual emotions and intimacy, immaterial immaterialities of everyday life, but even biopolitics, necropolitics, mimic visualities. And it's really so crosscutting across many fields and discipline that there is something there for everyone even if you work outside of the humanities. Without further ado, can I please invite Dr. Miyak to come online, share his screen and also share her slides with us. Over to you Dr. Mak. Thank you so much Crystal. Um let me just seamlessly share my screen. **[1:45]:** Um, is that showing? That's perfect. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much, Crystal. And um, thank you for today for inviting me. It's really amazing to be with you all. And the program looks fantastic. I'm sorry I can't stay because I have to go to work. It's really early in the morning here. Um, so, uh, I will just quickly dive in. I just wanted to give you some context because today um uh Kristen and Rachel suggested I do an overview of my book. So I just wanted to give you a bit of context. So as the title suggests uh I explore virtual and AI influencers and how they impact digital culture, society and economy. And I'm particularly interested in the way they worked across different realities. So not just virtual reality but re reality, AR, mixed reality. And I looked at over 40, well actually 40 virtual influencers over various platforms across various contexts, US, Japan, Brazil and so on. **[2:49]:** Uh and I conducted thematic and textural analysis. Uh looked at basically their accounts from where their profile started right up to 2023. And as you can imagine uh the landscape really really changed as I was moving through the research. Uh by the end of I finished the book it was very different. Uh so these are some of the key themes um uh that I want to explore today and I appreciate this is very specific. This uh program today is about Asia Pacific. I wanted to say some of this is beyond that but hopefully I'm going to touch on concepts that I don't know maybe can be thought of in different context and it will help um help with some discussion. So first of all, I just wanted to think um about the genealogy of virtual influences because there was a lot of sort of at some point between towards the end of 2010, media was going crazy saying, "Oh, you **[3:45]:** know, um virtual influences are popping up everywhere. But as we all know today, uh they're kind of maybe the word virtual influences might be relatively recent, but this idea of virtual figures have been there for a while. So I wanted to think about what it is in terms of not just the academic research but the forces that came together to create and let this ver virtual inference in its current form emerge. And so I started thinking about three different forces identified and um so one is existing discourses around the sort of philosophical ontological inquiry about who we are and how the virtual other not necessarily digital but there's always been a discourse around questioning this other that we've created and what it means for us the self and other and what it is to be human. And as you can see that matches the sort of academic discourse around it, philosophy, human computer interaction. **[4:50]:** They seek these sorts of questions and that's the way virtual influences are starting to be understood in some areas. Another second area I'm trying to move really quickly here because I have a lot to cover. Apologies if I'm speaking really quickly is in the area of marketing PR which has always had you know this idea of before even social media this idea of influencers and influencing and persuasive language as well as in terms of producing and consuming virt virtuality as we know you know that sort of pop virtual idols and things like that have existed for a while. So what I I guess this this third second forest is this idea of profiteering and the industry of influencing and ver commodification virtuality. So it's seen as a sort of yeah e economic political tool. Um and then the third category is obviously the technology. We need the technology there uh for virtual inferences to be created. **[5:54]:** So there is a we've always been fascinated into seeking other realities and how we can express different identities in other realities. So again the discourse um the academic discourse matches that sort of phenomenon. **[6:08]:** So there's these three forces came together and that's basically the first chapter looks at the genealogy and how virtual influences are we we've come to this point. I have to move really quickly. So um I one of the things that fascinated me about virtual influences when I was looking there was this general sense of India so here we see India's first virtual influencer or South Africa's virtual influencer Japan's there was a lot of this kind of claiming nations were claiming that virtual influencers almost like brand not just brand ambassadors but as national sort of ambassadors of culture. So I started to think about why this is the case and um I the concept here that I looked into is this idea of liquid reality. So I borrow this term for Bowman's sort of um liquid modernity but this idea that our realities because of the different sort of we exist in metaverse and reality filters augmented you know all that that there's a sense **[7:10]:** of convergence as well as fragmentation and in doing so there's a sense of disorientation in terms of ident you know because our identities are simultaneously fragmenting and converging that we need to perhaps perhaps redemarcate uh a senses of identity which includes nationalized sense of identity. So for me, what I saw with this rush of virtual influencers claiming where they're from nationally, well, when I say virtual influences, the creators of virtual influencers, um, there's a sense of a global neoc colonial contest to territorialize this new virtual frontier or new yeah virtual sort of AI people populated kind of frontier. And I saw it's in some ways a geopolitical kind of demarcation of differentiation uh based on nationhood. I'm not going to go into it deeply because of the time, but I looked at this through the lens of Emma and the way is a Japanese virtual influencer and how her images ter visually territorialize um the kind **[8:23]:** of virtual influencer sphere. But also I just wanted to also think about the way virtual virtual emphasis in particular IMA fashioned virtuality according to national aesthetics. So I just very quickly say Japan loves to play with dimensions. That's why there's 2.5D uh theaters and things. So a lot of visual content plays with dimensionality. Therefore branding a certain kind of Japanese style of virtuality. Um so that's the way I was thinking about the nationalization virtuality is something mixing um aesthetics and national symbols. Um another chapter I start looking into was um this idea of emotionality. So I noticed as you know I'm sure from your research a lot of virtual influencers especially the established ones have these complicated sort of storylines and lots of emotional like here is Mikuela. There's very emotional quote relatable content uh of crying and lots of yeah sort of this idea of emo humans human emotions being felt by virtual influencers but what was fascinating was for me the way the comments the way **[9:41]:** people were responding to this was equally effective and equally emotional and so for me I started to wonder why this was and in some ways it's the pandemic post pandemic that a real sense of people being used to idea of being connected to virt virtuality. So I not in terms of parasoi not even the simulation of relationships as Horton W said but actually the simulation becomes a relationship in Bujiad's way of simolacra similacrim. So for me I'm sorry I know I'm running out of time so I would pass through this but for me I started to think about this kind of emotionality in the sense of intracommunicative emotionality. So this idea this this simulation the being the relationship is partly due to not the the fact that it's in track communicative because it's both representational and presentational slightly different to Marshall's idea of that kind of interaction in **[10:47]:** the sense that virtual influencers don't have are just representational there's no life beyond there's not the real life version and a virtual influencer they are representational but they're also rely on presentational tools so in that way that's why I started thinking of it as intracommunicative but basically it's that kind of relying on that is the way effect is built and the sense of emotionality is built with the audiences and the fans and I just wanted to quickly in put in here as well I I contextualize this within the wider their um scope of social media capitalism and how virtual influences themselves are scripted in a way as a result of extensive research sentiment analysis conducted by those who create virtual influences. So in some ways they pick up on emotional trends that are online which are then fed back to us. So for me this this kind of intercommunicative emotionality is not just an emotional kind of um yeah connection between the virtual influencer and the fans at a sort of yeah effect level of effect but it's also a a **[12:05]:** level of economics or effective yeah effective economics of online social media. Um I need to was pass through sorry that I keep going very fast. So another thing that I started to think about again with this idea of the real and not real and how this connects is the very materiality of virtual influences. So here I was looking at Magaloo Lu Maraloo Ludo Magaloo who's a Brazilian virtual influencer who started off almost like a chatbox service um customer service interface for equivalent of sort of Amazon that sort of thing in Brazil. and she basically sells. So she presents everyday life scenes, but as you can see from these code, uh you basically th those are the codes almost like art. Um yeah, you you you click on those codes and it will take you to the items that you can see. So, I was really fascinated by this and thinking about how that's similar to what human influencers do in terms of selling products through everyday life scenes, but it's slightly different in the sense that they're not they don't have **[13:17]:** an everyday life. So I was thinking about uh this through this idea of born virtual and virtualized which are borrowed from sort of information management archive kind of language about objects that are born are sort of real life objects that are then virtualized and therefore exist in the virtual world versus virtually born um create th those things like Mudo Magaloo herself is created is virtually native interacting with virtualized products. Um, and this led me also I was thinking in terms of how this is inserted in everyday life. So I was thinking about temporality. So in terms of real human influencers as I said their time space their what appears on online content are slices time slices time space slices of their everyday life which constructs a sense of self the serialization of the self. But in virtual infants's case, it's actually they're it they they serialize the self through the production of everyday life. **[14:22]:** So they need to make everyday life in order to serialize themselves, you know. So it's a kind of serialization of time the temporality that makes that realizes them and it's done through these kind these born so virtualized products that appear in their born virtual everyday life. So I this part of this chapter and also I I invite you all as well. I'm sure you've been thinking about this yourselves. But this very idea of everyday life and virtual influences I wanted to challenge or actually just think about different ways of very everyday life as well in itself that it's very America at Euroamerican global north ways of thinking about everyday life has been the banel and somehow we're aestheticizing the boring you know influence human influences elevate what's boring and make make it beautiful which is the way we're thinking But one thing I was thinking about through **[15:23]:** Maralu Lud Malalu was in the case of Brazil um that everyday life means something else. It's sort of you know it's kind of about this idea of uh the violence and all that was part of the everyday life discourse. So within that something like V you know ludo mangaloo represents a different kind of reality. So I just wanted to throw that out that it's I think it's also important to rethink what we mean by everyday and that it's regionalized and it means it's it's highly you know we need to think about that in terms of theory and how we think about the banal and everyday life. **[16:01]:** Um this second half of my book um is is quite more critical and sinister in some ways. Uh, one of the things I started to notice was actually just the way virtual humans are created. Um, and this goes back to sort of virtual influences as well, how they are created. There's a lot of sort of and yeah, for me, I was looking at this specifically through the lens of race and raciality. So there was some uh sort of controversy for example around black uh influencers, virtual influences being created by white teens, things like that. So for me this bothered me and so that's why I looked into ver human create virtual human creation. And what bothered me was this ideal way that skin, you know, like black, red, I'm just reading it out there, black, red, yellow, and white to speed up the process of creating different ethnicities can switch. **[17:02]:** And in some ways, this is just artistic, you know, creativity and the name of hyper realism, high fidelity. We want sort of realistic looking skin colors. But the language was so much heart back to sort of colorism and the Lucian chromatics basically classification of people according to skin color. There's so much biological essentialistic sort of discourse around it. And what bothered me the most was that this is I guess I said because of high fidelity it's based on actual biodata existing from humans. So this isn't just beyond the visual sort of econ you know sort of ideological issues around race and representation but it's actually an issue about classification of datified bodies. So this is what Nakamura Lisa Manamura sort of ages 2009 called social algorithms but this is deeply disturbing sort of in some ways the creation of virtual inferences reflects that kind of exchange of racialized bio capital. **[18:07]:** It's deeply disturbing for me. So this is something I I I really wanted to look at. Um uh yeah, so it's almost veres on sort of surveillance/ capitalism, social media classes, capitalism, but we don't realize because virtual insulas are pretty and they sell things and uh you know uh they they obfuscate these kind of the these kind of things that are going on. Even the stuff that I said earlier on about a sentiment analysis, they're created from our data. That bothers me. Um I'm going to take a quick sec. So related to all this and moving sort of still taking a critical um maybe sinister or I don't know um depressed tone is um I was looking at this also in relation to pandemic and canning valley. So one of the things I noticed which was fascinating for me was during the pandemic loads of virtual influencers were shown wearing masks. **[19:12]:** Um, and what was interesting for me was on the one hand there was all this market of trying to create virtual influencers who were realistic and then the comments if I don't know something the CGI or didn't quite look human. People were quickly quick to point out, oh look, the hair doesn't look right. So people were hyperritical online about the realism of virtual influencers. But on the other hand, when virtual influencers were ill or showing actual human kind of bodily functions, people were super disturbed. So this is Ema falling ill. Um and people were sort of having a go at her saying, "Why are you ill? You shouldn't be ill." I mean, there were lots of sympathetic comments, but people getting upset that she was ill. That's Bermuda, who had a one night stand, obviously referring to sex. people were some were like go girl kind of thing but some were like you can't have sex or there's I just picked Mika but there's lot other influencers who eat and basically people would say what why are you **[20:20]:** you can't eat why are you eating so there was this crit criticism towards sort of realistic biology so there is a sense of unbiology that bulin preserts aren't supposed to age they're supposed to remain pretty forever they're not supposed to reproduce. They're not supposed to eat and digest. They're not supposed to be diseased or have sex or anything like that. So, this made me think of borrow beautiful uh um piece by black who talks about um uh unbi unclean biology in terms of cuteness and cute technologies. It sort of we're talking about the Barbie thing. We're not allowed to to show these kind of non-cute biologies. And this turns into fear. I realize I'm running out of time so it'll be very quick. So this fear for me really manifested quite strongly during the pandemic towards virtual influencers. There was for some virtual influencers a slight hostility towards that the sort of maskearing and things. **[21:22]:** So for me what I saw was a combination of theory forces coming to effect. The uncanny valley effect which is the kind of the feelings of discomfort towards sort of otherred technologies. Pandemic sort of the convert the sort of um the way spatiality and spatial proximity shifted during the pandemic because of actual lockdown. And this came together with racialized fears towards the other which sort of cyophobic attacks. this idea of dangerous other which has always existed towards um virtual influences as we know a lot of it you know virtual influences arise from Asia Pacific East Asia so there is that kind of fear towards technology towards East Asia um and so for me that really heightened during the pandemic um I I'm running out of time so very quickly say so this for me is it's a kind of specifically in the context of pandemic it **[22:22]:** was a necropol politics of virtuality, how virtuality can be weaponized in terms of what's clean biology, unclean biology, and who's otherred within this context. **[22:35]:** Um, I'm so running out of time, so I'll be very quick. I'll speed through two more chapters. I looked at virtual my me my mises and transmedia mobility. So one of the things um that I I I wanted to think about going back to time was how virtual influencers their content showed um different selves. So one of them was media through media. So lots of um pictures of old media. So polaroids, photo booths to to borrow sort of this idea to to create a his to historicize themselves through historical his historicized technologies. Another was so idea of imitation here. The other ones of use of different screens to represent the cells. a lot of photoshopping virtual influences showing how they were photoshopping themselves sort of a dramaturgical expression of the sort of self being created again the construction of the self through imitation of existing technologies um where the medium becomes **[23:44]:** a self so I'm sorry I'm really rushing and the reason why I wanted rushing is that I wanted to come to this bit so in some situation I then thought well actually virtual influencers aren't into really copying themselves. But in some ways um they are that is the style. The whole point of the virtual influencer is that they are born virtual as I mentioned earlier and they exist across different platforms. That's their appeal. So her here earlier on we have Rosie uh who is kind of that's the they start off she starts off in the and her Instagram and then it zooms into the metaverse. So that's an example of their trans media mobility. They can move across not just platforms but through different sort of media and different stylizations of themselves. Here we have Imma who's you can see the images of herself taken from her Instagram account which now exist in Animal Crossing. **[24:46]:** So there's different selves here which are no longer about imitating the original or splitting. you know, they're not mimetic. They're just different stylizations that are to do with almost like a marketing strategy. And this is where I was thinking about Japanese media studies where this idea of car and character, meaning there's the di the the self exists within the diagetic fictional world. So, Instagram for example here is then taken outside from to widen the audience as Kiara. So existing here as in the Nintendo Animal Crossing world in thereby kind of reaching more audiences. Um I'm sorry. So this is the last I promise this is the last chapter. So this moved into the sense of political economy of virtual inferences thinking about marketing. Um, so one of the things I just was thinking again in terms of being critical about this, what bothered me was the way who is making money out of virtual influencers because things like Mikella, their image show her **[25:52]:** as a working influencer like a human influencer, but she's not actually making money even though she's she's presented as being, you know, working for her um, uh, income. So, I I'm just I'm not going to rush through this because I'm over time, but I guess one thing I I wanted every I to think about was that and virtual inferences or I was in danger of anthropomorphicizing them that we I always forgot that there's actually people behind this and there's issues around for example copyright and ownership and who who's the responsibility of um producing these images and the case of for example FM Mecca for example here um I mentioned earlier that they sort of somebody um the black influencer who was created but I think it was an Asian um and anyway basically um but their image was borrowed by an actual rapper who then um sued them and this raises questions of just the legalities of creating virtual influencers. **[27:10]:** Um, okay, I'm just going to stop there because I'm running well over time. **[27:15]:** So, I'm just going to end with some final thoughts. So, for me, virtual influencers are both an extractivist technology. So this is what's really important for me is that they are pretty human beings who sell and make profit. But there's something there which is deeper than that which is almost a biological level. It's our data that's been produced that's been extracted in order to create these virtual humans who then sell things back to us reflecting us. So it's almost like a cannibalism um cannibalization of us. um and they're also transmedial representation. So they as we move into further into sort of worlds of AI this will become I think even more relevant but how they operate not just within social media but they're going to operate through multiple platforms through multiple sectors and as we start thinking more and more towards AI influencers um I think the things we will need to pay more attention to as just in the previous slide that gets explained very in depth but it is **[28:24]:** that kind of ethical side the so we need to think further about data governance and things like participation who's participating creating AI influencers because it's not just going to be a team a small team of I don't know whatever have 10 designers or you know it's we're it's going to be collective ways in which we produce AI influencers right um um and things like relationships as well we've heard of cases of people falling in love with chat bots and things like that. So I it's there's various things uh we need to think about and I don't want to necessarily end in a world of word caution but um I'm terrified but fascinated at what lies ahead and I'm sorry I've gone over a lot I will stop talking. Thank you so much Dr. Miyak. I'll let you catch your breath in a few minutes. Um for those of us without context, it is about 7ish 8 a.m. **[29:22]:** um where Dr. Miyaki lives and she also has a very big day ahead running events. I hope it's okay. I'm going to use my co-host prerogative to ask the one question that I want to know more about having read your book and also listen to your presentation. We are sorry you can't join us through the rest of the event, but we're very grateful to have had a bit of your time first thing in the morning. Um for those of us um who are here, please join us in thanking Dr. Miyak. In the link to the program, you will also find a link to her latest book. Without further ado, please allow me to introduce to us our practitioner keynote, Shmaine Poe. As she comes on screen and starts to share her slides, I'll introduce her.